Based on a true story, Lifetime’s Abducted By My Teacher opens with a situation that I related to all too well.

15 year-old Elizabeth Thomas (Summer H. Howell) is the newest student at the local high school.  She’s starting school in the middle of the year and she doesn’t know anyone at the school.  Everyone is wondering why she’s enrolling so late in the semester.  No one wants to run the risk of being the new girl’s friend.  Elizabeth can’t even find a table where she can eat her lunch.  Now, when I was growing up, my family moved frequently.  I started and left a lot of different schools and that meant that I got used to being the new girl.  I got used to people asking me questions about my past.  I got used to having to fit into a social system that had been established long before I arrived.  I learned how to make friends without becoming so close to them that it would hurt when I inevitably had to leave and go to a new school.  It never became easily but I do think I managed to handle it about as well as anyone could.  (Fortunately, I also had three older sisters to help me out.)

Elizabeth, however, has a problem that I never had to deal with.  She’s not only the new girl but the high school is also the first one that she’s ever attended.  Previously, Elizabeth was home-schooled by her unstable mother.  Now, her father has custody of her and Elizabeth is experiencing public school for the first time.  All of the teachers and her classmates know about Elizabeth’s past, leaving Elizabeth feeling like a freak.

However, things start to look up when one of her teachers, Tad Cummins (Michael Fishman), invites her to join the group of students who eat lunch in his classroom.  Tad is one of those self-consciously cool teachers who insists that his students refer to him by his first name.  He takes an immediate interest in Elizabeth and he even invites her to attend church with him and his wife.  At first, Elizabeth isn’t sure how to react to Tad but, eventually, she comes to trust him.  After all, he’s the only person at school who seems to care about her and he even helps her to get a job at a restaurant.  (Elizabeth’s boss so respects Tad that she’s willing to hire Elizabeth on his recommendation alone.)  Eventually, Elizabeth’s father (Gino Anania) grows suspicious of Tad’s interest in his daughter but, by that point, Tad has Elizabeth so in his thrall that he’s able to convince her to run off with him.

It’s a disturbingly familiar tale of grooming and abduction, one that features a sympathetic lead performance from Summer Howell and a memorably creepy one from Michael Fishman.  From the minute that we first see Tad, we went to tell Elizabeth to stay away from him but, as this film show, things often look different when they’re actually happening to you than they do when you’re on the outside looking in.  Tad is eventually reveled to be a messianic lunatic but, at the beginning, he’s simply the only person willing to give encouragement to someone who desperately needs it.  Having no experience with public education and the outside world at all, Elizabeth is easily manipulated but eventually, she reveals an inner strength that even she didn’t know she had.  Summer Howell does a wonderful job portraying Elizabeth’s transformation from being meek and easily manipulated to being strong and confident enough to face down her abductor in court.

This film was executive produced by Elizabeth Smart and Smart introduces the film.  Elizabeth Smart is someone who has survived a trauma that most of us couldn’t even imagine but she’s since spent her life helping others who have been in similar situations.  She deserves all the credit in the world.